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Parental Alienation Syndrome (Continued from page 18)


subtypes of PAS: mild, moderate, and severe stages of progression, related to numbers of symptoms from his cluster of eight symptoms3


. Another author promulgating Gard-


ner’s ideas, Douglas Darnell, PhD., created a list of 20 presumed symptom criteria of PAS (4). A sampling includes, “giving children choices when they have no choice about visits,” “telling the child ‘everything’ about the marital relationship or reasons for the divorce is alienating,” “refusing to acknowledge that children have property and may want to transport their possessions be- tween residences,” “resisting or refusing to cooperate by not allowing the other parent access to school or medical re- cords and schedules of extracurricular


3


Legal And Psychotherapeutic Approaches To The Three Types Of Parental Alienation Syndrome Families: When Psychiatry And The Law Join Forces. Gardner RA. 28 Ct. Rev. 14 (1991)


activities,” “a parent blaming the other parent for financial problems, breaking up the family, changes in lifestyle, or having a girlfriend/boyfriend, etc,” and others. Darnell also proposed three types of alienator parents: the naive alienator, the active alienator, and the obsessed alienator (ibid)4


. Women are accused


of alienating more than men, and the National Organization for Women (NOW) has denounced PAS (NOW To Denounce So-Called Parental Alienation (Syndrome)). www.now.org/organiza- tion/conference/resolutions/2006.html). Gardner eventually claimed that PAS was a subset of “parental alienation”5


, a


slightly less inflammatory categorization that suggests abuse, neglect, abandon- ment, etc. would result in justifiable


4 5


Divorce Casualties. Darnell, D. (1998). Taylor Trade Publishing, Lanham, MD.


Parental Alienation Syndrome vs. Parental Alienation: Which Diagnosis Should Eval- uators Use in Child-Custody Disputes? Gardner RA. The American Journal of Family Therapy, Vol. 30, Issue 2, p 93-115, March 2002.


estrangement from a parent. Justified estrangement remains controversial, an extension of the fairy-tale quality that suffuses psychodynamic concepts: once someone is identified as bad, punish- ment demands they go away.


Psychiatric Critique of PAS The Parental Alienation Syndrome


theorists rely on psychoanalytic concepts such as narcissistic injury, projection, sibling rivalry, pathological dependence, as antecedents to the blind and obses- sive hatred that drives one parent to alienate another parent, while the “poly- morphous perverse” child “provide(s) these mothers with an ample supply of material… for their projections and accusations”6


. Therefore, the first and


simplest criticism of PAS is that it is based on overstated distortion. Each of Gardner’s three key elements of PAS is falsely precise. To wit, any tainting of a child against a parent is damaging and worthy of intervention regardless of the context, not only limited to the con- text of divorce proceedings. Similarly, repetitive tainting is damaging to the child even if the result is not subsequent denigration of the targeted parent; even if alienation appears justified to some observers. Hostility is a common response to the stress of separation and divorce and not at all pathonemonic; a child’s reactions to the innate difficulties of divorce often run contrary to tem- perament and independent of parental behavior. Additionally, indoctrination is extremely difficult outside of controlled situations because internal and external factors interfere with programming and brainwashing. Curiously, wholesome family activities such as religious educa- tion, partisan politics, and enforcing a family tradition of participation in team sports rely on indoctrination techniques decried in other settings. A PubMed (PubMed is an online ser- vice provided by U.S. National Library


6. Family Evaluation in Child Custody Mediation, Arbitration, and Litigation, Gardner RA, 1989 by Creative Therapeu- tics, Cresskill, N.J.


20 Trial Reporter Winter 2008


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